Ripple’s blockchain, XRP Ledger, returned to normal service after its unexpected 64-minute interruption on February 5th. Temporarily halted wallet transactions by the disruption also caused concerns among market analysts and XRP holders.

According to Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz, the issue occurred due to a “network drift” a concept related to the consensus mechanism not running or running, but block validation failed. As a result, transaction processing came to a momentary halt.

Ripple’s Transaction Speed Under Scrutiny Amid Outage

Although it is unclear if this action restored the network or if XRP Ledger’s built-in self healing mechanism mitigated the problem, only one manually validated intervened to solve the issue, as usual, according to Schwartz. 

In essence, XRP Ledger “self heals” because its validators come to a majority consensus, and they self heal by resetting the starting point for block production in a new place.

Update: It looks like, as far as we can tell, only one validator operator manually intervened. It's still not entirely clear if that solved the problem or the network self-healed.

— David "JoelKatz" Schwartz (@JoelKatz) February 5, 2025

Transactions on Xaman Wallet, which is XRP Ledger’s key signing wallet comparable to Solana’s Phantom, were briefly disrupted by the outage. Although none of the assets were lost from the incident, Schwartz assured the community that no assets were lost.

🚨 The XRPL Ledger is currently halted, with ledgers not being validated. @XamanWallet app remains fully operational, but transactions on XRPL are not going through.

We are monitoring the situation closely and will provide updates as soon as we have more clarity.

Stay tuned. https://t.co/dCBW9C2Q7n

— Xaman® Wallet 🪝 (@XamanWallet) February 4, 2025

The outage has stoked skepticism among crypto analysts who were doubtful about the XRP’s long-term future. The blockchain’s slow transaction processing speed found itself under fire by Crypto analyst MartyParty. He stated:

“$XRP goes down at 20 tps. I dont think $XRP will work out.” 

XRP Faces Price Decline Following Disruption

After the disruption happened, XRP fell in price. On February 4th during US trading hours, the token fell by 6% and has been resisting to move above the $2.5 mark. However, as we write, XRP was under key moving averages, hinting at a short term bearish outlook.

XRP were dealt a further blow as the broader crypto market conditions remained tough for Bitcoin to break through $100K before retracing. It is likely that the XRP’s price movement is also influenced by this downward pressure on BTC.

The market, however, remains uncertain as the US Jobs Report coming out next week is scheduled to be released on February 7th. The technical resilience of XRP is obviously important, but so too is the performance of the rest of the macroeconomic tide and investors sentiment. 

The recent outage of the blockchain is a reminder that this network space will keep encountering challenges to getting network operations to run without a hitch.